Nuance Acquires Swype for More Than $100 Million

Nuance has acquired Swype for more than $100 million, reports Uncrunched. Swype lets you enter words on your touchscreen by sliding a finger or stylus from letter to letter, lifting only between words.

I'm a big fan of Swype, and this is a brilliant acquisition by Nuance. Swype first launched at a TechCrunch conference in 2008. It's software for mobile devices, and helps people input text at far faster speeds than through normal methods. It will soon be on over a hundred million devices. Nuance already has T9, a predictive text application first developed in the 90s, and T9 competes directly with Swype. Oddly enough, the cofounder of Swype, Cliff Kushler, also founded T9.


Swype is popular on Android devices but not officially available on iPhone devices; however, Andrew Liu has released a port for iOS.